No Man Behind
by Kit Chan76
Summary: Beware those with weak stomachs! ...or something... This has gore in it. Anyway, it's a war fic, heavily influenced by 'The Things They Carried' during our Vietnam Unit in U.S. history. It won a Gundam Wing Fanfiction contest on my mailing list, so I h


Hello all, what's up and donka for reading! Anyway, I'd like to put in a disclaimer, so I don't get sued or whatever for what tiny amount of money I have. So, standard disclaimers apply. All characters are copyright to their respective owners, and I don't own them or claim them in any way. ^_^  
  
Leave no Man Behind  
  
Prologue:  
War isn't describable. It's everything in the world, all encompassed into one period of time. Most people would say that I'm crazy for saying such a thing, but it takes one who has experienced the glory and terror of war to fully understand. And with that said, I'm going to tell my own account of what came to be known as World War III.  
It was the year AC 202 when I first heard that the Indochinese and Asian countries on Earth were very unhappy with their standings in the Earth Sphere Unified Nation's (ESUN) Security Council. Almost all of the countries, save for Japan (of which Hiiro Yuy was the military leader) had arranged a coup d'etat, planning the brutal and apparently, gorey takeover of the ESUN, including the assassination of Vice Foreign Minister Relena Dorilan. However, it was very fortunate that the United States' military, under the direction of Liutenant Duo Maxwell, interfered before anything could be done. That was when the whole thing started.  
By the year 203, 12,000 U.S. troops were crawling through the intense heat and muckey swampland that covered the majority of summertime Indochina. And yes, I do mean that they were literally crawling. Mobile Suits and Mobile Dolls were a thing of the past, they would always be that way. And the casualties were innumerable already. This fact stunned everyone in every allied country and colony, neither side would back away from battle--it was incredible.  
Looking back on it, the war was astonishing, from the first time that I'd even heard of it up to the point where I was informed that my help was needed. I remember that moment clearly, June 1, AC 203, Duo called me from his base in the middle of the country once known as Cambodia. Even today I recall the feeling of absolute horror when he told me that he'd been shot in the left of his chest, my stomach turned in tight knots as he told me that he absolutely required the Latin and Spanish military forces to help him. He'd already requested that Hiiro come to his aid, and the Japanese army was on their way. But that wasn't much. You've got to understand, military help was very hard to come by, especially after the space wars of AC 195 and 196. The terror that accompanied those stunted the expansion of any sort of defensive power in the ESUN, and with the expulsion of any mobile anything, military power diminished to a near nothing. That left the five of us former pilots with little power. I must say, that Quatre hadn't wanted to have a damn thing to do with any sort of military, and that left us with a measely 425,000 troops between the remaining four, give or take some odd thousand or two. The largest army by a long shot belonged to Chang Wufei. But then again, he had the largest area to work with. All of Asia, as well as one third of Africa, was under his military discression. But with those small numbers in mind, as well as the idea that nearly the entirety of the United States military was already in Indochina, I decided that maybe my fourth of the world's defense force was needed after all. I decided that my forces should come to his aid.  
The moment I hung up with him I knew I'd gotten myself into something more deep than I'd actually wanted. But there was no backing down. Within a week, my troops were off to Indochina to fight a war that most of the world didn't, and couldn't, fully grasp or understand--myself included.  
  
Fireworks:  
It was the first night that I'd even been out in the wild, forested area of Cambodia, and unfortunately, it wouldn't be my last. My small squadron, the first of ten small factions that were sent out, was comprised of about fourty men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-something. We camped in these tiny tents about ten feet square, maybe five of us, at the very least, in each tent, cramped in like sardines in their tins. The tents were in groups of threes, spaced about fourty yards away from each other. Not only the cramped space, but we had to deal with the humidity and the mosquitoes and the constant fear of having our bodies blown to shreds with primitive weapons that were probably not touched or worked with since the second world war.  
After appointing about a third of my men first night watch, I reentered my tent. It was full, four other young men sat in a circle, their weapons propped against their shoulders. Their conversation, which I could hear even before I entered the cloth structure, ceased as their attention turned toward me. They were all uncomfortable, I could see it in their eyes. But there was this one kid, Josep Loredo, who stood out to me most. He was the only one that hadn't stared at me when I'd came in like I'd grown another head. He remained in position in the far corner of the tent, staring down at his crossed ankles with a lookin in his eyes that was some kind of mixed up concoction of emotion that resembled fear and anger and confusion and all of the thousands of feelings that a soldier had when he was about to feel the brunt of an attack.  
Yeah, you can tell when you're going to be attacked. It's a kind of feeling in your gut that's not quite knots, but it's not quite nausea either. It's this adrenaline pump that sends you into a dull, easily suppressed panic. You can sense it on anyone when they've got it, almost the way that a dog senses fear on a guy. It was that feeling that warned me.  
At around two in the morning, the second third of my men were on watch. I couldn't have slept if you had given me some kind of industrial strength elephant tranquilizer, all I could do was recede into this odd state of self--I wan't asleep, I wasn't relaxed, I was tense as hell if you'd like to know the truth--but what it's what brought me back to my senses that was important. I heard this explosion, which wasn't as I'd remembered it. It was a lot louder than those I'd heard before--in fact, it was the first real one that I'd ever heard. All of the rest had been in space, which as we know is a giant void of nothingness where sound doesn't exactly project well. It's this thing called a lack of air. But once again, I'm finding a tangent.  
The explosion, which sent me into a kind of stranged shock for a moment, was accompanied by an earsplitting scream. I composed myself and grabbed my weapon, which was some poor excuse for a gun, and pelted from my tent. I nearly lost the rations I'd had for lunch that afternoon.  
A rocket had exploded about twenty feet from my tent, sending thousands of chunks of half-dried mud and rock flying in every direction, shrapnel from the casing following suit. But what had sent me into such a nauseous fit was the gore of it all. The first real gore I'd seen as well. Josep had been on watch that night. It was him that'd screamed. It was him--or at least part of him, that was at my feet. To be more specific, his upper half. I'd never seen so much blood before. It poured out of his severed torso like Niagra Falls. And I'd never seen dying eyes blinking at me before--I'd not thought it possible, even after all of that schooling that said 'only when your heart stops beating are you dead' and such bull like that. I stared down at those wide, brown eyes, and averted my own to keep the bile from rising. I whispered a quiet goodbye to Loredo and ran off toward my defense camp, where most of the explosions could be heard. At least two more since I'd come out of my tent.  
There was another explosion. But this time it was farther in the woods. I realized then that it was my defense specialists who were returning the fire. When I arrived to direct them, over thirty of the fourty men were present--it made me wonder what the hell I'd been doing that I hadn't noticed them leaving.  
It was then that Yui Koresko, diverted my attention into the woods. I could see shadowy figures retreating into the forest, the scuffle was over, for the time being.  
That night, I lost one of what I would have considered to be my most promising men--two others had been wounded with minor cuts from the flying rocks and shrapnel. And then it occurred to me again what I'd gotten myself into. This was an all out guerilla war, no rules, no structure. Just bombing the other guy, trying to save your own filthy skin. I realized that I probably didn't deserve to have my skin saved--I was a war veteran at the ripe old age of 23--who'd let a high school graduate of 18 die. I felt so worthless that I could barely see his body off.  
  
Undying Innocence:  
Week Three began with an eery silence. Sunday, June 22, was supposed to have been a holy day--some kind of special new religious holiday. To my dismay, however, thirty three American troops were killed somewhere north. So much for a holy day.  
It was noon when my faction finally joined Hiiro's in the dense thicketed forestland outside of Krâchéh, and unfortunately, had been reduced to a pathetic number of twenty two. No, not all of the others had died, persay--they were wounded in battle, or had on very rare occasions, become such a threat to our well being and safety that we had to send them back to the JOC. Gone rather insane, so to speak.  
But Hiiro's troops had remained completely and totally safe, unharmed. The explanation for that could have been because they were much more--militaristically advanced. As much as it hurts to say that, my squad was relying on heavily outdated equipment. We still had the LAWs and SAWs. The Japanese forces were equipped with these sort of advanced RPGs that shot bigger grenades farther. Those things packed a lot of punch. If one of those happened to explode, there would be some serious trouble. Like-- the entirety of a camp more than 20 feet square would be demolished by flying grenade shrapnel and rocks that got kicked up in its wake. Not a pleasant thought. They had incredibly powerful TOW missiles for city combat--when the Indochinese military decided that they would use the big tank guns and whatnot. Those things could break through the hull of a tank like a hot knife through butter. Blow the whole thing and everyone inside of it to indescribably small shreds.  
But that's not what mattered. Once we hooked up, we all got the more advanced weapons, and we set up a quick reaction force and named a group of combat control techs to strategize for us. It still amazed me, the way that Hiiro was so organized. Like nothing you'd ever seen before. It was astonishing.  
One night, I recall Hiiro's conversation with me. It was the first time I'd actually seen him with some kind of emotion about him, he was happy. He smiled at me through the dark of our tent, absolutely thrilled that no one had died that day. It was the first day since the whole damn war began that someone didn't keel over or blow up or something like that. The first day that no one had been sent home. But that wasn't the only reason he was happy. He crawled over and sat next to me, and pulled this tiny little picture out of the pocket of his cargos. I myself, pulled the battery operated lamp over to us and sat it down at my feet, so just enough light shined that I could see.  
I was absolutely dumbfounded. There, on the little picture, was a kid, no more than four or so. Hiiro was giddy at it--that dumbfounded me even more. He leaned over to me, and pointed at the thing, and told me it was his. He specifically said 'I still can't believe it, Barton. That kid is mine.' The kid turned four that day, Hiiro believed that that was why no one died. After he said that I couldn't do anything but stare. Maybe I uttered some kind of swear--but I can't remember that detail. The only detail I can recall from that exact moment was the idea. That tiny little face that stared back at me with unchanging features. Those deep brown Japanese eyes that radiated life and innocence and everything that wasn't Hiiro, but at the same time, wasn't Relena. I could already see the little kid in about ten years--master of anything laptop computer, military, or Mobile Suit history, but still with an annoyingly childish and immature air surrounding him. It made me want to be home--somewhere else where maybe I could do something that productive with my life. As much as I wanted to raise some kind of kid, I couldn't seem to break myself from old military habits. The whole vice president of the ESUN's Security Council role kept me busy almost twenty four seven. It made me envy him. It made me loathe him and hate him and at the same time, admire him for the magnitude of his accomplishment. He'd brought something into the world that I never would. He'd protect this little kid with his life--something I could never do myself. It made me thing of Josep and the way that I'd abandoned him. Though I knew he didn't have a chance at living through that grotesque explosion, I should have stayed with him instead of running away. I ran like a little school girl. I ran like a pair of cheap stockings. It made me sick to my stomach.  
I didn't sleep that night.  
  
Dead in a field of feces:  
The war progressed rather quickly, by week seven things were looking up for the allied forces. Yeah--things happened between week three and seven, but most of that is a whole lot of gorey crap not meant for a one shot 'let's get this off my mind' story. To sum it all up, there were fifteen Latin American troops--my troops, and twenty two Japanese troops in Hiiro's and my joined faction left. The rest were dead. Luckily though, we'd gotten some sort of lead on to exactly what we were fighting for. But at the same time, we got a big fight.  
My RTO had picked up on a transmission from the Indochinese dictator around two in the morning.  
I found out when I was rather rudely awakened by both rain and my second in command at three o'clock that some guy named Karim was sending an huge load of troops in our direction. They'd found our tiny campsite and would arrive within a half an hour. And as if that didn't make both Hiiro and I panic a little anyway, at the same time, his leader, Abdi, was planning another coup against the ESUN. We had our jobs cut out for us.  
Hiiro sent his RTO to a remote location in this giant--well--it was basically a giant flooded mud pit. The mission was to contact the JOC and send warning to Dorilan. To this day we don't know if the kid ever actually got that done.  
Within twenty minutes of the RTO leaving, there was fire. The stupid troops had arrived early, and had brought with them a few of their own RPGs, rockets, and nasty little hand thrown bombs. That's not including the typical weaponry that we all carried--guns and knives and such.  
The first explosion of the night once again came from their side. It hit one of our men directly. I recall the momentary silence that seemed to accompany the explosion of the grenade. The kid's eyes grew wide--I knew from the moment I laid eyes on him, for that split second, that he knew he was a dead man. But he was lifted by the sheer force of the explosion, carried into the air like a marionette, and then there was the bright flash, the deafening noise, and the blood and flesh and shrapnel that flew everywhere. When I was hit smack in the face with a huge wave of blood I nearly fainted. That odor still haunts me. I wouldn't be surprised if it still haunts Hiiro as well. He was standing right next to me, practically dragged me along to where our QRF was stationed while I dry heaved and staggered along beside him like a drunk while we were bombarded with explosions, gunshots, and screams of dying soldiers.  
The first thing I heard when we reached the QRF was 'hey LT are you all right?' The second thing was 'oh, so and so just got blown up, you want me to write a letter to his parents?'  
I could have died--both literally and figuratively speaking.  
We were being pushed back, a lot farther back than I'd wanted to be. Back into the muck where Hiiro had sent his RTO, Mamoru Tsuiko at least twenty minutes earlier. The gunshots that rained around our 33 man squadron nearly always missed--at best catching a man in the shoulder. When they didn't, the majority of the time, they smacked loudly into the mud, splashing it up against our faces. The rain didn't help either. When I raised my SAW, I could barely see a thing. My vision was blurred by a sheer lack of sleep and the water that dripped into my eyes. So, I shot half blindly, hoping to hit anything that was assailing my men.  
The muck was horrible, the smell and texture and idea of it all made me nauseous. We were thigh deep in the crap, half of us sunk down to our waists, if not farther, and I could have sworn that if we didn't keep our guard up, we would have sunk down into it like it was man eating quicksand. But luckily, none of us did--save for the dead.  
By the time our troops had killed off the remaining Indochinese, the death toll had been eight. That included Hiiro's RTO, who we found half buried in the mud while we were gathering our dead. He'd been shot in the back of the head--an ugly wound about the size of a dime. Apparently the bullet had lodged itself somewhere inside his skull. But he laid on his side, buried up to his nose in muck. I'd never forget the sight. I'd never forget the smell.  
  
An American Nightmare:  
Do you remember how I said at the beginning of this, how Duo had called me from his base? We met him a little later.  
Week ten. By this time I'd lost almost any sense of sanity left in me. I was so sick of the whole war that I could have gone on some kind of killing rampage against my fellow soldiers. But I decided against that for obvious reasons and tried as hard as I could to seal it all back. I could tell that Hiiro was having the same problem, though he was having an easier time dealing with it. He was, after all, the perfect soldier.  
We were now nearing the Cambodian military base in Chau-phu, close to the border of the country formerly known as South Vietnam. Here, we were all nearly killed by a jumpy, half sleeping stoner of an American soldier who was on a recon mission with two of his buddies. They shot at us, we yelled at them, told them that we were allies, and finally were led back to the American camp.  
That camp was like nothing I'd ever seen before. I couldn't have fathomed the incredible living quality that these men had. They had a building with bunks and everything. But apparently that was luck. Duo had located an abandoned MS hangar, he'd had it secured by his finest men, and now, 150 of his soldiers were in that building having a grand old time. From the moment that Hiiro and I had stepped into the area reserved as Duo's personal 'LT space,' as his head CCT called it, we knew that something about the guy had changed. The place was spotless, and in the corner sat Duo, in a chair behind an old looking desk that his soldiers and he had restored. But he was so much different. His chestnut bangs still dangled around his face in a complete dissheveled looking mess, but the rest was short, closely resembling Hiiro's. But his looked more tattered and chunked. I heard a half gasp from Hiiro, I can't remember what my reaction was--other than surprise. I approached him in silence, and stood in front of his desk for a moment or two, trying to examine what he was working on.  
But Duo looked up before I had the chance to make anything other than a map out.  
He offered a forced, but friendly smile and stood. We saluted each other in the formal military fashion, and then he spoke, his voice calm and cool as it'd always been, but more urgent and informed than before.  
"Trowa, how many have you got?"  
"Ten, not including myself. Hiiro has fifteen, not including himself," I replied, attempting to sound more urgent than I really felt. All I wanted to do was go to sleep.  
"My CCT has requested that we move in on the military headquarters. We'll give them a coup like they've never seen before."  
What surprised me was what Duo did next. Or rather, what he said. He turned away from me and faced one of the broken windows that overlooked the remainder of the barren camp. He sighed and shook his head as he crossed his arms behind his back, clasping his hands. "I'm ready to kill them all. I'm sick of worrying about the civilians anyway. They're just as stupid as the army here--they're probably involved in this stupid war behind our backs."  
I turned to Hiiro and he approached in silence. He, however, must have had more guts than I did, that or maybe Duo's sadistic and vengeful words startled him to irrepressable curiosity. But at the time we didn't know that revenge was what he wanted.  
Later that night I decided to go visit with Duo a bit. It took me a while to get there, I got half lost on the way, and ended up in the right direction, walking through one of the corridors, actually it was simply an open space that led from the main hangar to Duo's--quarters, I suppose you could call them that. It was just another open space, blocked off by a makeshift wall without doors and a single window. But I had to stop outside, someone was already in there, I listened a bit to the conversation.  
It sounded like a young kid in there, not more than my age, which in retrospect, wasn't exactly that young. He was talking about how nuts he was going. He said something about seeing things, hearing things at night. He was losing his mind, his voice was shaky, I could have sworn it broke a few times. Duo replied calmly, saying that he couldn't let him go home, he could only reassign him back to the U.S. JOC, but that would be a less than pleasant experience. If he was taken there, he'd have to deal with the dead bodies that'd been haunting him constantly. In fact, he'd probably be the medic that cleaned up the corpses.  
The boy stormed out of the office, half in tears, and I stepped in. Duo was shuffling a few papers, and then he looked up at me from his cot on the floor. He offered the same forced grin that he had earlier, and stood, welcoming me inside. He apologized for not having any chairs, and leaned back against the wall after I'd taken my seat, cross legged on the rock floor.  
"So what are you here for? Is there a problem?"  
I shook my head, indicating the negative.  
"All right--just come to shoot some bull with me then?"  
"I was wondering ab--"  
"My hair?"  
I nodded, half angry at being rudely interrupted that way. But I forgave Maxwell quickly, finding myself incapable of staying mad at him for a long while after seeing the look on his face. He began to explain to me about how he'd been taken as a POW after his men had abandoned him in his foxhole, wounded and half in shock. One of the enemy troops found him unconscious the next morning and immediately recognized him as the LT, simply by the silver bar that graced two inches of his right shoulder. The soldier dragged him back to his command center in the heart of Cratie. They stuck him in this dark, cold cell where he was kept away from almost all human contact and sunlight for a week. He explained to me that the first thing that they did when they brought him out was taken to this abandoned, dead courtyard. He was thrown down by his neck, face first into a pile of dirt and mud, and they nearly broke his nose by slamming his face into the ground to stun him. The guards held him down by his arms and legs and neck. And he told me that all he could feel was a heavy weight being pressed on his back, two knees pressing into either side of his spine, and a hand yanking his head up by the yard-long braid. He told me how he could clearly remember the popping sound that his neck made when they pulled it into the awkward and uncomfortable position. They slashed his hair away in one clean sweep with a dagger, then did a rather bad job trying to shorten it farther. He escaped later though, made his way back to camp on foot. That had to be hell for him, too.  
Next, Duo explained to me that the entire point of them taking him and not killing him in the first place was to not only interrogate him (luckily to no avail), but to break him, which proved fruitful, and psychologically damage him so that he could screw up his faction's plans.  
You've got to understand something about war. It's about ninety percent psychological. Maybe more. The whole point was to make the others panic, make them lose their cool, because once they did, they made stupid errors. For example, one night, when Hiiro's men joined mine on first night watch, there were noises. We still don't know if there were IC forces wandering around out there, or if they were just animals, but it screwed those guys up so bad that one of them peed themself. I heard shots in the forest that night and immediately rounded up the QRF, and we took off toward the southern end of our campsite. I was pretty mad when I found out that they'd shot at some kind of animal out there. It's all psychological. Those guys didn't stop tensing up and freaking out on night watch for a week.  
  
Assault on Pnum Pénh:  
Week twelve, it'd been three long months since we'd arrived in Cambodia. We all set out toward Phnum Pénh to assail the area's military base, where that Abdi character was meeting with his men. It was the most organized military plan that I'd dealt with since arriving over there. A week ago, Duo had radioed back to his JOC and had told them to send a group of U.S. Rangers over to see what was going on, to do some reconaissance. They had apparently hired an IC refugee and had them driving around in a stupid beat up old car to locate the building. As primitive as the plan was, it seemed to have worked.  
Maps were drawn, U.S., Japanese, Chinese, and Latin troops were all contacted within hours. It was decided that since Wufei was closest to Phnum Pénh at that moment, that he would lead the attack and secure the area with twenty of his best men. The remainder of the U.S. army would move in about an hour later with helicopters and bombs, circling the city until Hiiro and my forces were in position for backup and evacuation purposes. All in all there would be about one hundred and fifty men, the majority of them from the U.S. and Chinese militaries, armed with humvees and the latest in combat weaponry.  
We moved into the city slowly, in groups of ten. We followed Duo's faction into the desert like city. It was dry and dusty and hotter than a sauna on high settings an no ventilation. The red sand stained our boots and fatigues and we all started to get tired before we even reached the halfway point. But once we reached the secured are, we knew it.  
I saw Wufei, crouching behind the side of a building with his hand to his mouth. He was holding a radio transmitter, talking to who I assume was Duo. He was surrounded by a squad of four men, who all looked up at my troops like they were ready to kill us all. But Wufei lowered his radio before anything could break out, and motioned us over.  
I knelt.  
We waited for hours to be given the signal to ambush the two story sandstone building, watching the American Rangers move themselves into position. I tried, for a while, to take my mind off of the mission, I looked around at my own soldiers, then at Wufei's. They were all so young still, they were trying so hard to at calm and cool and relaxed, and some of them put on a convincing show. But others--you could tell how absolutely terrified they were of the mission. Of the war in general. But they wouldn't do anything to get themselves out like some others had. They couldn't have done what the others had. They didn't have the balls to shoot themselves, or cut themselves, or go out against orders and act totally insane. Those ideas themselves all seemed a bit crazy, but they'd been done.  
But what are you going to do about that? Any kind of war could make anyone a little nuts. Relatively. You see, it's all relative in war-- insanity, heroism, and even truth itself. What one guy would think was crazy, another would thing was heroic. If something absolutely tragic happened, some guy would be laughing his nuts off. And the element of truth? That deserves its own paragraph. Its own chapter. Its own novel.  
I can't tell you the comlete truth behind anything. Not the Cambodian War, not from the Space Wars of AC 195 and 196--not from times of peace. The explanation? Everyone percieves things so much differently than the next guy will. Everyone sees different things at different moments from different points of view. I mean--put three guys in a room and show them something, and they'll all tell you what they saw. Sure, it'll be almost the same, almost the same. Almost right. But they'll be different. That's why there were people like Hiiro. Trained from birth to be completely objective with observations. They only report what they can physically prove,not just coming close. Close only works with grenades and nuclear explosions.  
I heard Wufei begin to talk a little later on. He was speaking through his RTO, who was talking to Duo's RTO; I assumed that he was getting the go-ahead to set up the perimeter. Wufei looked up at me and nodded--that was my signal.  
  
It was Wufei and me and six other men. Three from my faction, three from his. We sat, hunched over, guns in hand, beside the target building, looking skyward, waiting for the Rangers to begin the raid on Abdi's 'secret meeting.' We were the 'green berets' as they were once called--the elite soldiers that would serve as backup in case anything went wrong. Little did we know, lots would go wrong.  
It all began the instant that the Rangers began the raid on the building. I heard an explosion, and immediately knew what had gone wrong. Everything had been rigged.  
I pelted around the side of the building in time to catch one of the Rangers being thrown with explosive force, literally speaking, through the front wall. He laid there, lifelessly on the ground, skin burned so badly that it was peeling away from the muscle and bone in a bloody, charred mess. He was most definately a dead man, and if it'd been as horrible as I thought it had, the explosion killed everyone in that building. I whirled around and called to Wufei, we had to get away from there. There was sure to be tons of IC guerillas around there, and their eyes were on us.  
No sooner had I said that when I heard shots being fired, bullets whizzing past, men around me falling like they'd been made of concrete. I heard my RTO screaming at me. We were being fired at--one of the U.S. factions had been attacked while in hiding behind a building. Apparently the place had been bombed and had collapsed on top of them.  
There was now a new mission.  
  
Lost:  
It was four in the morning, day three in the city. Wufei and I had been making our way slowly through the dark, since the first day, holding our weapons close to our chests, wondering why the hell we'd even decided to take the war call in the first place. We had scheduled a rendevous with Hiiro's men, who now had the most troops in the area. My entire faction had been killed--most of Wufei's as well. They'd all been offed while we were advancing toward the fallen building. But Hiiro's had managed to hook up with Duo, and they had secured themselves in a group with three U.S. humvees and had been killing off incoming IC soldiers since dawn, and now they were waiting for us.  
Wufei and I were crossing one of the amazingly wide, barren and sandy streets when we were shot at again. The snipers had been laying silently along rooftops and inside of buildings--but we'd still not been able to kill a single one ourselves. I had been leading the way across the street, ducking behind buildings and abandoned humvees that (more often than not) housed several deceased American soldiers, but once we came to the center of the street, there was no more cover. We decided that we would sprint along together, there was an abandoned looking wooden cart that sat down the road a long way--we'd hide behind there.  
We began the sprint.  
Shots rained down on us like hail in a tornado, and in one instance, a bullet came so close to hitting Wufei in the skull that we could both hear its distinct, high pitched whistle as it sped by. That thought surprised me so much--but it made me panic. We sprinted faster and faster the closer that we got to the abandoned cart, the whirring and whistling of round after round deafening us to the point of near confusion. It wasn't until we were about twenty feet away that the shots were more accurate. One was about an inch from my chest--another cut through the loose part of Wufei's sleeve, scratching his wrist a bit.  
I shoved Wufei carelessly behind the cart, wanting for at least one of us to stay alive until we reached Hiiro and Duo at the humvees. And for an instant, the world seemed to stop. It was an odd experience at that moment--I don't know why that moment in particular. Maybe it was because it was that moment that I felt the true impact of exactly what was going on- -I felt alone, afraid, and at the very least, angry. I was angry that I'd even gotten myself involved in the war in the first place--I'd spent three months or more in the sweltering heat, the forests and mud fields of Cambodia. A stupid, tiny little country that was little even recognized in anything, and yet--there I was. A soldier in battle for a cause that was stupid in the first place. They didn't have enough representation. What reason was that to go to war in a world of total pacifism? At that thought, I felt this emotion welling up in my gut--it came to my throat, it made me feel nauseus and uneasy and incompetant. I remembered, in that instant, the way that I'd lost so many men--how many letters I'd written home to loving parents whose children were now dead from a bullet wound or a careless error in a mine field. I felt lonely, all I wanted was to go home. But once again, I remembered that I was too far away. I concluded that I was lost. Completely and totally lost in an old, run down city in the heart of who knows where.  
I wanted Heavyarms. I wanted revenge, I wanted pain and suffering to go down on those damn IC soldiers like they'd never felt before.  
But then, time unfroze itself, regaining momentum. And then I felt it--impact. A burning sensation shot through my arm like somebody had lit it on fire and left me with no means to put it out. I cried out and dove, practically landing on top of a rather worried looking Wufei, and held my arm as though it'd been severed from my body. It was only a flesh wound-- but it had been my first severe one--the rest had simply scratched or in one case, bruised. I was terrified.  
Shots still rained down on us as Wufei dragged me as gently as he could under the cart, where we would be safe for the time being. I remember being in this dazed state, my vision was blurry and my mind seemed fogged over. And I can remember Wufei pulling out his radio and a med kit from his pack, hovering over my arm as much as he could, given the low ceiling, and he began to treat my wound, calling on his radio for help.  
I'd never seen him so panicked in my life. But then again, that's what war does to a person. It changes them to something that no one should ever have to see. It kills them inside--takes their humanity away from them. And that is in good cases. Others can't get the smell of blood off of them--they can't stop themselves from killing. I'd seen it in AC 196, when I was just a kid. On Earth, people killed each other, claiming that they supported either the ESUN, or that the other person was threatening the peace. Memories came flooding back to me in torrents.  
That was all I could recall from that night.  
The next morning, I woke with a start, finding that Wufei was still awake next to me, laying on his stomach with his rifle cocked to his shoulder, silencer on. He wasn't even aware that I'd come around until I tried to move too much, ending up on my bad arm. I winced and drew a breath in, trying to keep quiet. But it hadn't worked. Wufei looked down at me with icy, deep brown eyes, and nodded toward the street. I looked out--a pile of dead IC soldiers laid there, a bloody mess. Their bodies were caked with sand and mud. They'd not seen the shots coming. Wufei had just picked them off one by one as they'd come running to kill us. And for the first time, I felt thankful.  
"There aren't any more for right now," he whispered to me, voice low and emotionless. "There's a humvee on its way--apparently they're about three blocks from here. Should be here in a few minutes."  
I nodded and watched the half-wet sand from under the cart. It was a pitiful position that I was in, and I'd realized that several times since I first woke. But the sand made the thoughts recede for a moment. The wind picked it up and swirled it around, and set it back down again so gently that it looked as though nothing had disturbed it at all. Grains blew slowly across the ground, and fell to rest again once the wind died down. And then I spotted it.  
The thing that I can remember most vividly from my entire experience in that wasteland was something so insignificant, something that we all take for granted every day. It was this gutter--but not that in itself. It was the tiny droplets of water that dripped down to the ground every few seconds or so. Those drips reminded me of so many things--it was those little drips that made me realize how insignificant I was--they made me realize my position in the world. I was just one person in this huge mass of life and those drips of water made me remember that. They were just as I was, we were the same. In the end, no one would care, no one would even know we existed. Give the world a hundred years, and no one would recall my name just as they wouldn't recall the light rain that'd fallen the night before. I couldn't even remember the last time it'd rained. I couldn't remember what day it was. I only knew my objective--my objective and those tiny drips of water, dripping away, only to be soaked into the sand.  
  
Recovery:  
The humvee picked Wufei and me up within moments, I was placed inside of the armored vehicle, right below the turret gun that poked out through the ceiling. Wufei sat next to me, and we were taken away. We were tended to well on our long drive back to the U.S. JOC, and one of the younger soldiers by the name of Michael Rodela explained to me exactly what had happened.  
Apparently the whole mission had been a big bust. The initial explosion had killed Abdi--the roof of that building had caved in on him. And the other building? Well, when the QRF arrived to help, they found that all of the bodies had been taken already, and a shabby looking paper was left on top of the rubble, along with one of the helmets. The Japanese linguist translated it. The IC troops, most of whom had been killed by U.S. and Japanese troops, had taken the bodies and were going to send them back home. We didn't know what shape they would be in--we couldn't expect much from them. But at least it was over. Few that had entered Pnum Pénh had exited, myself, Wufei, and Duo included in those numbers. We'd not heard anything of Hiiro yet, and that was what worried me. When I asked Rodela what'd happened to him, he'd replied that he didn't know there was a Lt. Yuy.  
I spent the rest of the ride home in a dazed panic.  
We arrived back at the American JOC after about six hours, where three humvees full of men were greeted happily by troops that we didn't even know existed. That camp was enormous, surrounded by tall, thick rock walls on all sides, barracks and tents and small buildings lining the inside. Soldiers from all of the allied countries were there, even my own men. The 1,650 that I'd sent to set up a perimeter around Cambodia were all there, save for the ones that'd been killed, leaving 1,500. But I was, for the first time since I could remember, happy. I was happy to see that most of our troops had lived through that gruelling experience, we'd be able to see our families again.  
But I still didn't know anything about Hiiro.  
I wasn't left with much time to think--another young American boy, by the name of Crysanth Masters approached me with a welcoming smile and helped me to stand. He told me that he was the United States' Rangers' head medic, that he was going to treat my arm for whatever infection Wufei had said I'd developed. I was led into one of the larger, gray stone buildings where I saw tons of men laying, wounded, dying, dead. Crysanth, however, saw my reaction to the soldiers, and led me into a fresh room. He told me that it was a recovery room when he laid me down, that I'd be taken care of quickly and efficienty--just the way an LT should have been. I replied that I didn't really feel as though I needed special treatment for my rank. He replied otherwise.  
But when Crysanth left the room, I finally got to look around. I was ecstatic when I found out who my roommate was--he called me from across the room, through the curtain that separated our halves. But when the soft voice carried to me, I jumped and rolled over, carefully avoiding laying on my bad arm. It was Hiiro who'd been talking to me. He'd been wounded in the leg by grenade shrapnel--nearly had died when the second building collapsed. His story amazed me. He'd crawled fourteen blocks to get back to the humvees, one leg out of commission, and somehow, had managed to survive it all. He'd even gotten to pilot one of the turret guns in the humvees. He told me that it was almost like Wing Zero.  
We both laughed at the comment. It was the first real, heartfelt laughter I'd experienced since I'd been appointed vice president of the Security Council. I didn't realize that work had kept me so busy. But then again, work had given me memories, good or bad it didn't matter. I still had memories.  
  
The troops that fought in Cambodia that summer returned to America, to the Earth Sphere Unified Nation's special ceremony that was held in honor of us. It was there that Hiiro, Duo, Wufei, and I were awarded with medals of honor, we were all given purple hearts, Wufei and Duo were given a silver star for heroism. We all stood in front of our respective sections of the ESUN's Armed Forces Unit, and gave long winded, formal speeches about how heroic they'd all been, how we regretted having lost so many men in the war. But that wasn't how I felt, and I knew it wasn't how anyone else felt.  
We were all remorseful, we all had regrets. We'd been rewarded for manslaughter, the killing of men who either were suspected of, or were acting in the Indochinese military at the time. We'd been rewarded for their surrender. But what about the men who'd died? What about the men who's bodies we'd not been able to recover? What would they get?  
Nothing. Not even a proper burial.  
It made me think of that one phrase--coined by who knows who in some ancient war before the space colonies even existed. We'd not abided by that one, simple rule of thumb for any war, an example being the case of Loredo. I shook my head while I was on the podium and spoke to myself quietly with a slight laugh, a sarcastic, regretful tone lining my voice. The microphone projected my nerve wracked, memory stricken thought out to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.  
"Leave no man behind." 


End file.
